Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Wisconsin
The city of his birth sent Richard Schickel off on a lifelong career. Here’s what the film critic and historian discovered when that job brought him back home.
The La Follette children grew up in the painful brilliance shed by an illustrious father.
“One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a president,” Franklin Roosevelt once said.
The naturalist Aldo Leopold not only gave the wilderness idea its most persuasive articulation; he offered a way of thinking that turned the entire history of land use on its head.
The trouble began at midmorning on Wednesday, April 21, 1948, when a neighboring farm’s trash fire got out of control.
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R.
A chance meeting in a raucous hotel lobby nearly one hundred years ago led two drummers to make a spiritual mark on hostelries worldwide
Whatever other surprises might erupt on a trip across the country, one thing you can pretty much count on is the presence of a King James Bible in your hotel or motel room, put there by an organization called the Gideon Association. That’s as much as most of us know.
History by a Dam Site
The humble structure at the right—as the sign conveniently tells us—is indeed a dam, but it is no ordinary dam.
The Winnebago Indians called him 0Ke-wah-gah-kah (“Man Who Takes the Pictures”) and he certainly did that, over a career that spanned more than four decades.
A few dazzling words about that emerging metropolis, delivered in 1871 by Congressman J. Proctor Knott. Edited for 1971 visitors by David G. McCullough
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